RealGM 2023 Top 100 Project - #9 (Kevin Garnett)

[Clyde Frazier]

Vote 1 - Magic Johnson
Vote 2 - Larry Bird

Not many players started their career off with a bang the way magic did. He led the lakers to 60 wins and a famous finals clinching performance against the sixers with 42 pts, 15 rebounds, and 7 assists. This came against a sixers team who ranked 1st in DRTG that season. To have that kind of impact out the gate as a rookie is rare to say the least.

His marked consistency throughout his career from a statistical as well as team standpoint (lakers made the finals 9 times from 80-91) was remarkable. For a guy who didn't develop a 3PT shot until late in his career and did play guard regardless of size, posting a TS% of 60+ for the majority of his career was more than impressive.

No doubt he had plenty of talent around him over the years, but he was the key to navigating that team to their success throughout the 80s (cue the "tragic johnson" stories...) He had a truly unique impact on the court due to decision making that was only rivaled by a select few in the history of the league.

I'd also argue that he was a top 3 basketball mind of all time, and if you want to be conservative he was very clearly top 5. His on the fly decision making was incredible, and he followed that up with consistent play overall. If magic didn't live up to expectations, his truly unique skill set wouldn't have been as impressive. The fact that his level of play paralleled that skill set puts him in very short company.

[OhayoKD]

I'll also mention Jerry West as someone I've gone back & forth with respect to Oscar over the years. In the end my criteria for this project sees Oscar as being the more accomplished player. I think I'd draft West ahead of Oscar - better scorer, considerably better long-range shooter, better defender, also a passing whiz when given the opportunity - but the reality is that West in vivo had greater synergy issues than Oscar did. I don't think this was West's fault - I'm critical of coaches, management, Baylor for many years, and Wilt pre-Sharman - but it is what it is. West will be up for me soon, but not before Oscar.

Great write-up and vote, to no surprise. When you mentioned “synergy issues”, am curious as to what you mean? Am not the biggest fan of the concept of scalability, but it seems like West would be better in this regard than Oscar.

In a nutshell:

I think that on average that West had more talent on his teams than Oscar, and that the gap between their team success is smaller than the talent gap.

If we're looking to place blame, we can argue that all of it belongs to Baylor, Wilt, coaches, and higher-ups, and arguing that that means West should rank higher than Oscar makes sense.

Aside from the fact that it's debatable whether that is the best approach to the GOAT list, a couple other things, the second related to the first:

1. Oscar seems to have had a dominant personality that led him to control every situation he was in (with the exception of the battle against coach Bob Cousy, but that's not necessarily a knock on Oscar). He dominated his college team, and he came right into the pros and dominated them, and even when he went to the Bucks when he was no longer the best player, he was very clearly the floor general. While I respect West's willingness to fit in around Baylor, it's possible he and the Lakers would have accomplished more if he called BS on Baylor's primacy.

2. While both Oscar & West eventually won titles on dominant champions, I'd say that Oscar played a bigger role in the 1971 championship than West did in the 1972 championship. Oscar was central to that Bucks team becoming what it did, and this is by some measures the most dominant team-season in NBA history. The 1972 Lakers, while it would superficially seem to relegate Wilt rather than West, in reality Wilt was the keystone of the team with West sharing the offensive attack with Gail Goodrich.

Was he really more central than West? the 1972 Bucks were better at full-strength than the 71 Bucks despite Oscar dropping off and played like a 62-win team in games without him. They then outscored Wilt-West Lakers with Oscar falling off a great deal more due to injury.

What makes you think West was a smaller factor than Oscar?

[Dr Positivity]

Vote

1. Kevin Garnett
2. Stephen Curry

A little more longevity for KG (I figure 10-12 KG is about the excess value here, which is still meaningful and almost led to 2nd Celtics title + threatened Lebron in 12) cancels out Curry playing in more advanced era to me. I also think Curry is a bit more system dependent.

Nominate DIRK

[eminence]

Voting Post

Vote #1: Kevin Garnett
Vote #2: Magic Johnson

Nominate: George Mikan

KG - 4th round he's been at the top of my ballot, y'all get it by now. Played great for a long time. Cast was levels worse (relative to competition) than anyone else, won as much/more with them as any non-LeBron player could've.

Magic - 1st time voting for Magic. Spectacular career arc cut short. Could've been top 5. Vs Curry I prefer his longevity, find him a bit less injury prone. Vs Bird I prefer his longevity by a hair and wind up valuing Magic's early seasons over Bird's late seasons. Probably a slight edge to Magic in the middle as well, though pretty close. Vs Kobe he's down longevity, but I don't generally consider Kobe the same caliber of player at his best as the others here. Pretty much all of the non-KG players on this ballot led pretty blessed NBA careers, with Magic/Bird/Kobe drafted into aristocracy and the Warriors quickly ascending to it (so a point to Curry there for helping raise a franchise up to that level - the Warriors had been near joke tier for the decades prior).

I tend to agree with Doc that Magic ascended to the top of the Lakers hierarchy (and to a lowish MVP level) starting already in '82 and then held at that level and above for the next decade. I see all of Magic/Bird/Kobe having their best defensive years early (higher on Bird, lower on Kobe than consensus) and fading on that end as they advanced on the offensive end. Curry I see blitzing the league with his offense, settling a bit lower but more consistent and generally slowly improving on defense (slowing at this point, but much later than the others).

Mikan - been on the ballot for a bit now, with a simple case: clearly best player in the league for an extended time.

[lessthanjake]

1. Wes Unseld did not ever get the MVP over Kareem. He got it the year before Kareem entered the league. And Cowens won the MVP over Kareem once, not three times. Cowens also only won it because his team won a massive 68 games. That’s very much not what happened with Moses Malone. Moses won his first two MVPs without his team even winning more games than Kareem’s! Indeed, in 1981-1982, Moses got the MVP in a year that Kareem’s team won 10 more games than Moses’s. Indeed, Moses’s team won the least games of any top-10 MVP finisher that year. For his first MVP, no one in the top 5 in MVP voting was on a team that won fewer games than Moses’s team. Moses was just regarded as the best player and therefore got the award.

Winning MVP over 80's Kareem is a bit different than winning it over 70's Kareem.

He also won an MVP over 1970’s Kareem.

I genuinely don’t see the point about skill set. Physically dominant big men have been good in every era.

Not via "dominance on the boards".

Moses wasn’t just dominant on the boards. He wasn’t Andre Drummond. He also scored 27 points a game on about 109 TS+ in those years—largely using physical dominance to do so (along with a good jump shot and some surprisingly acrobatic rim finishes).

And he had a good mid-range jump shot too—which in this era probably would end up being a three-point shot (note: his FT% was good enough that I don’t think it is all that speculative that he could’ve shot the three). He’d be like Joel Embiid with much more dominance on the boards and a bit less rim protection. In any event, I think most people are voting based on how a player played within their era, not based on some speculative notion of how well they’d do in the current era.

And worse passing, shot-making in general, "dominance on the boards gap" probably smaller than the defensive one today. Most voters use those speculative notions to an extent. Hence why Russell ended at 4th and Mikan finished 19th the last go around. I imagine that actually played a part in your own justification for earlier votes.

I’d be hesitant to assume that Moses’s dominance on the boards was less important than other things. When he joined or left teams, their relative offensive rebounding % tended to go up or down about 4% or 5% on average (not just in the minutes he was on court, but in the team’s overall numbers), and that was higher in his peak years. The math is a bit more complicated than this, but roughly speaking, causing your team to get an offensive rebound about 4% or 5% more often basically increases offensive rating by about 4-5% (actually slightly more for various reasons). That’s an enormous difference, and I don’t think there’s much of any evidence that Embiid has that kind of effect defensively. For instance, last year the Sixers had a defensive rating of 116.3 with Embiid off the floor, and a 113.3 defensive rating overall—which suggests he had a +2.6% effect overall on their defensive rating (and that’s probably overselling it since he is on the court with stronger players than average). The same analysis for the year before would be +2.9%. Granted, that’s all a bit back-of-the-napkin, but in general I just wouldn’t underestimate the effect of Moses Malone’s offensive rebounding.

If your point is that, if they played today, Moses might not be able to extract as big a gap on the offensive boards, then I’d say perhaps that’s right, given the lack of emphasis on offensive boards nowadays. I’ve noted in prior posts that there’s a bigger tradeoff in going for offensive rebounds now, so maybe Moses wouldn’t be able to go for as many (or if he did, it might have a bigger opportunity cost). But, of course, if he played today, he’d be playing against fewer bruising big men, so he might find it even easier to get those boards when he went for them, which could make him even better at it. It’s hard to know. Overall, I do think there’s a point that extracting value from being incredible on the offensive boards is a bit tougher nowadays, so it’s reasonable to think he might not be quite as good in this era as he was in reality. But he was great in his era (which matters most in this analysis) and the reason to think he’d maybe be a bit less good in today’s era is specific to the recent era (i.e. it doesn’t apply to the vast majority of NBA history).

The only other guy to win an MVP in that timeframe was Dr. J, and it was pretty obvious Moses was better than Dr. J, given that they were on the same team for a year and Moses was the team’s clear best player. Bird was really good in that timeframe too (he was there for four years of it), but was pretty clearly statistically inferior to Moses.

Circular. And second claim probably is dependent on what stats you end up using. Kareem actually looks as good or better than moses in the playoffs by that box-stuff you like:

It’s not circular. The two players were on a team together and it was super obvious which one was better. It was like LeBron and Wade on a team together.

As for those playoff stats with Kareem, they look very similar to me, and Moses got the better of Kareem when they actually faced each other in the playoffs in that era, so I’d say tiebreaker goes to Moses there.

Bird "outplaying" Moses is also certainly a conclusion you can defend with the box-score. Bird actually looks better via bbr BPM during that stretch for both the rs and the playoffs. Ben's BPM is also pretty low on him. Seems like you're being selective with your assessment of Moses's "statistical dominance".

I don’t know why you’re putting “statistical dominance” in quotes. I never said peak Moses displayed “statistical dominance.” He was great statistically and also was plainly recognized at the time as the best player, given that he got 3 MVP awards in those 5 years, with two of them being when his team won as few or fewer games than all the other major candidates for the award. When a player dominates the MVP award over a given time period despite having a relative lack of team wins, I think our baseline assumption should be that he was the best player in the league, unless there’s some significant reason to think otherwise. As it is, box stats don’t provide any such reason—with him looking very similar to (or perhaps even slightly better than) Kareem and better than everyone else. The fact that the MVP is merely a regular-season award doesn’t provide any such reason, as Moses won a dominant title in this timeframe, dragged a weak team to the finals another year, and got the better of his biggest rival both times they met in the playoffs. Nor can we reasonably say that impact data provides such a reason either. We basically have zero WOWY data for Moses in the timeframe, but we know that the Rockets completely collapsed when he left, that the 76ers were raised from really good to historically great when he joined, and that the on-off numbers we have for one year in this time period show him having a +15.6 on-off for a season. We also don’t have any real indication that the MVP votes themselves were seen as particularly controversial/wrong/close at the time, given that Sporting News’s MVP was the same in all those years too, and none of the actual MVP votes were all that close (with 1982 being the closest, but Moses still got twice as many first-place votes as the 2nd place person that year). I just don’t really see any compelling reason to second-guess his dominance of the MVP award in that timeframe.

[rk2023]

.

In a nutshell:

I think that on average that West had more talent on his teams than Oscar, and that the gap between their team success is smaller than the talent gap.

If we're looking to place blame, we can argue that all of it belongs to Baylor, Wilt, coaches, and higher-ups, and arguing that that means West should rank higher than Oscar makes sense.

I could definitely agree with this in regards to the 69/70 Laker squads - as well as that Baylor vastly trumps any 2nd option Oscar was paired with during his Royals tenure (Let alone Wilt). As Penbeast mentioned, I also think there could be an argument that the Royals depth chart was better which seems true at first glance - though I'd have to take a more granular look into things. I see you mentioned above and below West/Baylor's dynamic, and I'm with you there but probably am more lax in the sense that this is not something I would ding West on - as he was sacrificing some aspects of his game to fit next to Baylor (I don't think Baylor was a selfish teammate / unintentional sabotage-agent by any means necessary either). Lakers Wilt on the other hand is a much more puzzling player to assess, but am in the same camp where such synergy is something that is a moot point in how i'm looking at West's career in the grand scheme of things.

Aside from the fact that it's debatable whether that is the best approach to the GOAT list, a couple other things, the second related to the first:

1. Oscar seems to have had a dominant personality that led him to control every situation he was in (with the exception of the battle against coach Bob Cousy, but that's not necessarily a knock on Oscar). He dominated his college team, and he came right into the pros and dominated them, and even when he went to the Bucks when he was no longer the best player, he was very clearly the floor general. While I respect West's willingness to fit in around Baylor, it's possible he and the Lakers would have accomplished more if he called BS on Baylor's primacy.

2. While both Oscar & West eventually won titles on dominant champions, I'd say that Oscar played a bigger role in the 1971 championship than West did in the 1972 championship. Oscar was central to that Bucks team becoming what it did, and this is by some measures the most dominant team-season in NBA history. The 1972 Lakers, while it would superficially seem to relegate Wilt rather than West, in reality Wilt was the keystone of the team with West sharing the offensive attack with Gail Goodrich.

Both great points, I saw you also mentioned Oscar in light akin to a Chris Paul [or Peyton Manning in football, perhaps] (a more serious?, calculated on-ball QB / 'control freak' with the results to show for it) in your nomination for him. This is something I'm not too willing to ding him for in an all-time / rankings sense - and I find it being a prime-long tendency due to the nurture factor and instant talent to catalyze a 5-man tandem with his basketball ability. I don't think you could go wrong either way, and am not left surprised in the slightest that many avenues paint both as highly impactful, indispensable players.

One thing I'm not sure on is if Oscar's role in 1971 as opposed to West in 1972 was that much bigger. This isn't quite apples to oranges (as the Lakers improved from 1971 to 1972 due to a more defensively dialed-in & efficient Wilt - as well as Goodrich breaking out), but West was quite valuable for the Lakers in 1971 iirc - with their PS offense collapsing in his absence. On the other hand, The Bucks improvement was largely allocated towards young Kareem I would say.. while they performed exceptionally well in 1972 when Oscar was injured. Food for thought here, though I am aware surrounding-season extrapolation might not be the most optimal method at gauging who was the better player between the two in 1971 / 72 respectively (I'd say West for Regular Season, Oscar for Playoffs).

[Doctor MJ]

Great write-up and vote, to no surprise. When you mentioned “synergy issues”, am curious as to what you mean? Am not the biggest fan of the concept of scalability, but it seems like West would be better in this regard than Oscar.

In a nutshell:

I think that on average that West had more talent on his teams than Oscar, and that the gap between their team success is smaller than the talent gap.

If we're looking to place blame, we can argue that all of it belongs to Baylor, Wilt, coaches, and higher-ups, and arguing that that means West should rank higher than Oscar makes sense.

Aside from the fact that it's debatable whether that is the best approach to the GOAT list, a couple other things, the second related to the first:

1. Oscar seems to have had a dominant personality that led him to control every situation he was in (with the exception of the battle against coach Bob Cousy, but that's not necessarily a knock on Oscar). He dominated his college team, and he came right into the pros and dominated them, and even when he went to the Bucks when he was no longer the best player, he was very clearly the floor general. While I respect West's willingness to fit in around Baylor, it's possible he and the Lakers would have accomplished more if he called BS on Baylor's primacy.

2. While both Oscar & West eventually won titles on dominant champions, I'd say that Oscar played a bigger role in the 1971 championship than West did in the 1972 championship. Oscar was central to that Bucks team becoming what it did, and this is by some measures the most dominant team-season in NBA history. The 1972 Lakers, while it would superficially seem to relegate Wilt rather than West, in reality Wilt was the keystone of the team with West sharing the offensive attack with Gail Goodrich.

Was he really more central than West? the 1972 Bucks were better at full-strength than the 71 Bucks despite Oscar dropping off and played like a 62-win team in games without him. They then outscored Wilt-West Lakers with Oscar falling off a great deal more due to injury.

What makes you think West was a smaller factor than Oscar?

I think that's a great conversation we should keep having. Certainly there's not a question as to who held up better in '71-72 - that was West. So Oscar's basically a spent force before West is...though of course he's also a regular MVP candidate before West is.

Re: 1972 Bucks better at full-strength than 1971 Bucks. Please elaborate. I'm not really sure what you mean.

What I will say though is that it does seem telling that the Bucks had the ultra-dominant run in the 1971 playoffs, but then lost the next post-season despite seeming to be a of a similar tier. Hard for the '71-72 Lakers to be as dominant as the '70-71 Bucks when they had to play the '71-72 Bucks. I can see an argument for the '71-72 Lakers being the greater team.

I think it's pretty indisputable though that West wasn't at his best in the 1972 playoffs. I believe he's been on record talking about the mixed feelings of finally winning a title, but playing about the worst he'd ever played in the playoffs as it happened.

If we just go with a stat like Win Shares, while Oscar is the clear #2 on the champion Bucks playoff run, West falls to #5 for the champion Lakers playoff run after being #2 in the regular season.

Re: Bucks outscore the Lakers while losing. Interesting. So, let's set some context here:

In the regular season, the Lakers won 4 out of 5 meetings.
In the playoffs, the Lakers won the series in 6 games.
That means that over the course of the year, the Lakers won 8 while the Bucks won 3.
Seems pretty decisive.

4 of the games, including 3 of the series games were decided by less than 5 points. The Lakers won all 4. If the Bucks win all 4, then the Bucks win the matchup and the series. What role did luck play in all of this? I won't pretend to know all the answers here. Clearly in the very last game Oscar's injury was a big factor.

[rk2023]

In a nutshell:

I think that on average that West had more talent on his teams than Oscar, and that the gap between their team success is smaller than the talent gap.

If we're looking to place blame, we can argue that all of it belongs to Baylor, Wilt, coaches, and higher-ups, and arguing that that means West should rank higher than Oscar makes sense.

Aside from the fact that it's debatable whether that is the best approach to the GOAT list, a couple other things, the second related to the first:

1. Oscar seems to have had a dominant personality that led him to control every situation he was in (with the exception of the battle against coach Bob Cousy, but that's not necessarily a knock on Oscar). He dominated his college team, and he came right into the pros and dominated them, and even when he went to the Bucks when he was no longer the best player, he was very clearly the floor general. While I respect West's willingness to fit in around Baylor, it's possible he and the Lakers would have accomplished more if he called BS on Baylor's primacy.

2. While both Oscar & West eventually won titles on dominant champions, I'd say that Oscar played a bigger role in the 1971 championship than West did in the 1972 championship. Oscar was central to that Bucks team becoming what it did, and this is by some measures the most dominant team-season in NBA history. The 1972 Lakers, while it would superficially seem to relegate Wilt rather than West, in reality Wilt was the keystone of the team with West sharing the offensive attack with Gail Goodrich.

Was he really more central than West? the 1972 Bucks were better at full-strength than the 71 Bucks despite Oscar dropping off and played like a 62-win team in games without him. They then outscored Wilt-West Lakers with Oscar falling off a great deal more due to injury.

What makes you think West was a smaller factor than Oscar?

I think that's a great conversation we should keep having. Certainly there's not a question as to who held up better in '71-72 - that was West. So Oscar's basically a spent force before West is...though of course he's also a regular MVP candidate before West is.

Re: 1972 Bucks better at full-strength than 1971 Bucks. Please elaborate. I'm not really sure what you mean.

What I will say though is that it does seem telling that the Bucks had the ultra-dominant run in the 1971 playoffs, but then lost the next post-season despite seeming to be a of a similar tier. Hard for the '71-72 Lakers to be as dominant as the '70-71 Bucks when they had to play the '71-72 Bucks. I can see an argument for the '71-72 Lakers being the greater team.

I think it's pretty indisputable though that West wasn't at his best in the 1972 playoffs. I believe he's been on record talking about the mixed feelings of finally winning a title, but playing about the worst he'd ever played in the playoffs as it happened.

If we just go with a stat like Win Shares, while Oscar is the clear #2 on the champion Bucks playoff run, West falls to #5 for the champion Lakers playoff run after being #2 in the regular season.

Re: Bucks outscore the Lakers while losing. Interesting. So, let's set some context here:

In the regular season, the Lakers won 4 out of 5 meetings.
In the playoffs, the Lakers won the series in 6 games.
That means that over the course of the year, the Lakers won 8 while the Bucks won 3.
Seems pretty decisive.

4 of the games, including 3 of the series games were decided by less than 5 points. The Lakers won all 4. If the Bucks win all 4, then the Bucks win the matchup and the series. What role did luck play in all of this? I won't pretend to know all the answers here. Clearly in the very last game Oscar's injury was a big factor.

I would have to defer to Ohayo on this more-so, but iirc the 72 Bucks weren't too far off their 1971 SRS / pythagorean wins and outright win record in spite of having a span without Oscar playing.

[OhayoKD]

I don’t know why you’re putting “statistical dominance” in quotes.

I was replying to f4p not you.

He also won an MVP over 1970’s Kareem.

He won one and that was 30+ Kareem on a 48-win team. Kareem finished 4th that year. Beating 25-year old Kareem when he wins 60 a year removed from a goat-peak candidate strikes me as more impressive. The other two came in 82 and 83 where Kareem finished 10th behind his own teammate.. Kareem being in the league there does not make those two wins any more praise-worthy, even if you put alot of stock into that sort of thing(I don't).

Saying "he beat Kareem for an MVP!" is like saying Jokic beat Lebron for one. Well, yes, that is true, it's pretty wierd to glaze him for it.

Moses wasn’t just dominant on the boards. He wasn’t Andre Drummond. He also scored 27 points a game on about 109 TS+ in those years—largely using physical dominance to do so (along with a good jump shot and some acrobatic rim finishes).

Sure. Scoring + Rebounding =/ does not historically track with "generating the most value" which is where(rightly or wrongly) some of the skepticism comes from. The other source is the lack of replication of that great signal from 83. Alot of unheralded players enter the tippity top if we put lots of stock in one-offs. Other top-value generating bigs were either elite-creators and/or highly impactful defenders.

I’d be hesitant to assume that Moses’s dominance on the boards was less important than other things. When he joined or left teams, their relative offensive rebounding % tended to go up about 4% or 5% on average (not just in the minutes he was on court, but in the team’s overall numbers), and that was higher in his peak years. The math is a bit more complicated than this, but roughly speaking, causing your team to get an offensive rebound in 4% or 5% more possessions basically increases offensive rating by about 4-5%. That’s an enormous difference, and I don’t think there’s much of any evidence that Embiid has that kind of effect defensively. For instance, last year the Sixers had a defensive rating of 116.3 with Embiid off the floor, and a 113.3 defensive rating overall—which suggests he had a +2.6% effect overall on their defensive rating (and that’s probably overselling it since he is on the court with stronger players than average). The same analysis for the year before would be +2.9%. Granted, that’s all a bit back-of-the-napkin, but in general I just wouldn’t underestimate the effect of Moses Malone’s offensive rebounding.

The question is translation though. Embid's influence gets muted with pace, space, and shooting but he's actually a similar rim deterrent than the fairly mobile tower that is Gobert and is tougher to score on in the post.



His passing and shooting also becomes a bigger outlier the more you translate back to juice an all-time post-scorer with all-time touch and power. If we can ding Russell because similar defensive influence has not been replicated across history in more talented versions of the nba, it's fair game dinging Moses along the same lines.

How you weigh that is whatever, but I'd say history shows that not being great with the ball is a big limiter across history for offensive engines(not that Moses achieved all-time highs on that front), and not being a strong paint-protector is a big limiter for bigs in general.

But he was great in his era (which matters most in this analysis)

That is entirely a matter of criteria but even setting that aside, it is fair grounds to ask how reflective his situational value is with his value across a variety of teams.

It’s not circular. The two players were on a team together and it was super obvious which one was better. It was like LeBron and Wade on a team together.

If you said "it was pretty obvious Lebron was better than Wade given they were on the same team together and Lebron was the team's best player", it would definitionally be circular reasoning. In fact it is the same sort of reasoning that is often offered when people say KD>Steph. Justifying a conclusion with itself is circular.

As for those playoff stats with Kareem, they look very similar to me, and Moses got the better of Kareem when they actually faced each other in the playoffs, so I’d say tiebreaker goes to Moses there.

[/quote][/quote]
Better idea: How about instead of cherrypicking a matchup, we just give the tiebreaker to the guy who won more during that stretch(it was Kareem). As is, NBA history would suggest "getting the better of a matchup" is alot less important than people think it is. Just ask Wilt.

As is, you can say "similar", but they favor Kareem.

[lessthanjake]

He also won an MVP over 1970’s Kareem.

He won one and that was 30+ Kareem on a 48-win team. Kareem finished 4th that year. Beating 25-year old Kareem when he wins 60 a year removed from a goat-peak candidate strikes me as more impressive. The other two came in 82 and 83 where Kareem finished 10th behind his own teammate.. Kareem being in the league there does not make those two wins any more praise-worthy, even if you put alot of stock into that sort of thing(I don't).

Saying "he beat Kareem for an MVP!" is like saying Jokic beat Lebron for one. Well, yes, that is true, it's pretty wierd to glaze him for it.

Except it’s not the same as Jokic beating LeBron for MVPs, because Kareem proceeded to win an MVP award during this time period. And, if you don’t value beating Kareem for the award, then he also beat Bird, Magic, etc. You can say that some of these guys weren’t at the absolute peak of their powers, but pretty much everyone else has windows like that too where superior all-time greats weren’t quite at the peak of their powers. And Moses is the guy left who actually took advantage of that to be the best player for a significant time period. It’d be like if Karl Malone was the best player in the league the second half of the 1990s. We could sit here and say it wouldn’t mean that much because Jordan was older, Hakeem was older, and Duncan only just came in towards the end, but it’d still be a big deal, and it was something Karl Malone was not actually quite able to do (though he did nab 2 MVPs). Moses did.

Moses wasn’t just dominant on the boards. He wasn’t Andre Drummond. He also scored 27 points a game on about 109 TS+ in those years—largely using physical dominance to do so (along with a good jump shot and some acrobatic rim finishes).

Sure. Scoring + Rebounding =/ does not historically track with "generating the most value" which is where(rightly or wrongly) some of the skepticism comes from. The other source is the lack of replication of that great signal from 83. Alot of unheralded players enter the tippity top if we put lots of stock in one-offs. Other top-value generating bigs were either elite-creators and/or highly impactful defenders.

On overall effectiveness/value offensively, I’d direct you to my earlier posts detailing what we know about Moses’s effect on his team’s offense.

For instance, we know that, over the course of his four years in Philadelphia, the 76ers had a +11.6 better offensive rating with Moses on the court than when he was off the court and that that was easily the highest of anyone on the team. For reference, that is slightly higher than the difference in offensive rating for the Nuggets with Jokic on vs. off in the last four seasons.

We know that when he left Houston, the team’s offensive rating dropped from 108.3 to 97.0, despite not having any real difference in health between the two seasons.

We know that when he joined Houston, even before his peak, he took a team that was a good offense without him and turned it into a team that had the highest rORTG in the history of the NBA to that point, besides the 1967 76ers, the 1971 Bucks, and 1972 Lakers.

There’s strong indicators that Moses had a tremendous amount of value offensively. It’s not just looking at offensive rebounding numbers, or even just the effect on team offensive rebounding percentage. We can look at the whole offensive picture and see that prime Moses seems to have had a very elite effect on his offenses overall.

His passing and shooting also becomes a bigger outlier the more you translate back to juice an all-time post-scorer with all-time touch and power. If we can ding Russell because similar defensive influence has not been replicated across history in more talented versions of the nba, it's fair game dinging Moses along the same lines.

How you weigh that is whatever, but I'd say history shows that not being great with the ball is a big limiter across history for offensive engines(not that Moses achieved all-time highs on that front), and not being a strong paint-protector is a big limiter for bigs in general.

I don't think this makes sense really, since we just haven't ever seen another player who rebounds like Moses and is an efficient volume scorer (edit: Besides Wilt, obviously a super valuable player). For instance, Dennis Rodman had similar effects on his teams' offensive rebounding rates, but he was extremely limited offensively otherwise. There's no real comparator with Moses, so I don't think we have any basis to say what "history shows" about a player like him.

It’s not circular. The two players were on a team together and it was super obvious which one was better. It was like LeBron and Wade on a team together.

If you said "it was pretty obvious Lebron was better than Wade given they were on the same team together and Lebron was the team's best player", it would definitionally be circular reasoning. In fact it is the same sort of reasoning that is often offered when people say KD>Steph. Justifying a conclusion with itself is circular.

I think I've just been assuming that you (and others) are aware of some basic background facts here. But apparently I have to explicitly link this back to stuff I’ve already been posting about. The evidence that peak Moses was the superior player to Dr. J when they were on a team together isn't just that I'm saying he was better. It's obvious from basic background facts. Moses Malone is the one that won MVP, with Moses getting 69 first-place votes and Dr. J getting 3, so he was obviously widely seen at the time as having been the superior player. Moses is the one that won Finals MVP. FWIW, Moses had higher PER and higher Win Shares by a good margin, and, notably, that gap became enormous in the playoffs. Moses had a +15.6 on-off, while Dr. J had a +10.3 on-off. It’s just obvious that, when they were on the same team in Moses’s peak time period, Moses was the superior player.

Better idea: How about instead of cherrypicking a matchup, we just give the tiebreaker to the guy who won more during that stretch(it was Kareem). As is, NBA history would suggest "getting the better of a matchup" is alot less important than people think it is. Just ask Wilt.

As is, you can say "similar", but they favor Kareem.

I’d say that the “matchup” matters quite a bit, when it determined the playoff fate for the teams in 40% of the years in the time period we are talking about. And it’s nothing like Wilt, since Moses’s team *also* won the series both times they faced each other, including in a year where Moses had a vastly inferior team.

As for Kareem having “won more,” there’s no comparison whatsoever with the teams they had. The one year in this time period where Moses had a similarly talented team, his team was completely dominant—winning the title far more easily than the Lakers ever did, and sweeping the Lakers in the Finals. The rest of the time period, Moses had a clearly inferior team, and he managed to actually drag them to the finals once (beating the Lakers along the way)—which I’ll note is something prime Kareem actually never got close to doing when he had a not-super-talented Lakers team (including in the first year of the relevant time period).

_______

EDIT:

I was replying to f4p not you.

This doesn’t actually substantively matter, but this is just demonstrably false. You said the relevant quote (i.e. “Seems like you're being selective with your assessment of Moses's "statistical dominance"”) as part of a response to something I said. And indeed, beyond that it was organizationally placed as part of your response to something I said, it’s also very clear it was directed towards me, since in the same paragraph you included a different quote of me talking about whether Bird “outplayed” Moses when they met in the playoffs. You were *clearly* directing this towards me, not f4p. And, in any event, the quote you were falsely attributing to me (i.e. “statistical dominance”) was not something that f4p said in his post about Moses Malone either. So this was a made-up quote, and when confronted with the fact that it was made up, you untruthfully said you were replying to someone else who had also not stated that quote. Again, it doesn’t substantively matter, but I want to flag since we should have standards of discussion that are above this.

[One_and_Done]

I have the vote at 10 Magic, 8 KG, 3 Curry, and 1 Kobe.

I notice not alot of agreeent on a nominee besides Mikan. So far 7 players have votes as a nominee, with K.Malone, West, Dirk, D.Rob, Moses and Oscar all having 1-2 votes each

[lessthanjake]

I have the vote at 10 Magic, 8 KG, 3 Curry, and 1 Kobe.

I notice not alot of agreeent on a nominee besides Mikan. So far 7 players have votes as a nominee, with K.Malone, West, Dirk, D.Rob, Moses and Oscar all having 1-2 votes each

Yeah, I think the nominee portion of this is pretty interesting at this point—with no clear frontrunner. Practically speaking, it probably doesn’t matter much who gets nominated now, though, because whoever is nominated now isn’t actually going to have much of a shot of being voted in for a while, and by that time several of the other candidates for nomination right now will have been nominated too.

[penbeast0]

...
I don't think this makes sense really, since we just haven't ever seen another player who rebounds like Moses and is an efficient volume scorer. For instance, Dennis Rodman had similar effects on his teams' offensive rebounding rates, but he was extremely limited offensively otherwise. There's no real comparator with Moses, so I don't think we have any basis to say what "history shows" about a player like him.
...

Pettit, Wilt, Karl Malone, there have been a few. FWIW, they have all been extraordinarily valuable players as well.

[eminence]

I can see some offensive parallels between Mikan/Moses (though I feel Mikan was a significantly better passer).

[OhayoKD]

...
I don't think this makes sense really, since we just haven't ever seen another player who rebounds like Moses and is an efficient volume scorer. For instance, Dennis Rodman had similar effects on his teams' offensive rebounding rates, but he was extremely limited offensively otherwise. There's no real comparator with Moses, so I don't think we have any basis to say what "history shows" about a player like him.
...

Pettit, Wilt, Karl Malone, there have been a few. FWIW, they have all been extraordinarily valuable players as well.

And I would say the only one of those players who was "the league's most valuable" was Wilt who was also an all-time-great defensive force and a good(at least for the time) passer.

[lessthanjake]

...
I don't think this makes sense really, since we just haven't ever seen another player who rebounds like Moses and is an efficient volume scorer. For instance, Dennis Rodman had similar effects on his teams' offensive rebounding rates, but he was extremely limited offensively otherwise. There's no real comparator with Moses, so I don't think we have any basis to say what "history shows" about a player like him.
...

Pettit, Wilt, Karl Malone, there have been a few. FWIW, they have all been extraordinarily valuable players as well.

I wouldn’t say Karl Malone rebounded well enough to qualify for what I’m talking about. But yeah, you’re right that Wilt is an pretty good example, though I’m not actually *sure* if even Wilt was at Moses’s level in offensive rebounding (sidenote: if there’s data on offensive rebounding rate for Wilt, I’d definitely be interested in seeing it; the combination of needing to adjust for the higher number of rebounding chances back then *and* not knowing the breakdown between DREBs and OREBs makes me quite unsure where Wilt would fall in offensive rebounding specifically). Of course, Wilt also tended to be even more of a volume scorer than Moses and whatnot, so it’s not a perfect comparison. But agreed that that’s probably the best one.

[lessthanjake]

...
I don't think this makes sense really, since we just haven't ever seen another player who rebounds like Moses and is an efficient volume scorer. For instance, Dennis Rodman had similar effects on his teams' offensive rebounding rates, but he was extremely limited offensively otherwise. There's no real comparator with Moses, so I don't think we have any basis to say what "history shows" about a player like him.
...

Pettit, Wilt, Karl Malone, there have been a few. FWIW, they have all been extraordinarily valuable players as well.

And I would say the only one of those players who was "the league's most valuable" was Wilt who was also an all-time-great defensive force and a good(at least for the time) passer.

Wilt is also the only one that maybe offensive rebounded anything like Moses. It’s really not a common thing, and Karl Malone definitely isn’t a valid comparator IMO. Prime Moses had about twice the offensive rebounding rate of prime Karl, and the *lowest* offensive rebounding rate of Moses’s career was still 40% higher than the *highest* offensive rebounding rate of Karl’s career (14% vs. 10%). In any event, on the question of value, Moses was literally deemed the most valuable player in the league 3 out of 5 years—despite his team not being all that great in two of those three MVP-winning years. He was widely understood to be a hugely valuable player, and what happened to his teams when he left Houston and joined Philadelphia backs this up, as does his on-off in the one year in the time period we have that data for.

[OhayoKD]

I have the vote at 10 Magic, 8 KG, 3 Curry, and 1 Kobe.

I notice not alot of agreeent on a nominee besides Mikan. So far 7 players have votes as a nominee, with K.Malone, West, Dirk, D.Rob, Moses and Oscar all having 1-2 votes each

FWIW, I'm pretty sure if all the registered voters voted, KG would end up with more votes.

For Doc's pessimism, KG seems to have risen significantly in spite of much of the initial argumentation for Garnett(ceiling raisier, best player in 2008!, better than duncan!, would be better in today's game!) being less popular now.

[falcolombardi]

Winning MVP over 80's Kareem is a bit different than winning it over 70's Kareem.

He also won an MVP over 1970’s Kareem.

I genuinely don’t see the point about skill set. Physically dominant big men have been good in every era.

Not via "dominance on the boards".

Moses wasn’t just dominant on the boards. He wasn’t Andre Drummond. He also scored 27 points a game on about 109 TS+ in those years—largely using physical dominance to do so (along with a good jump shot and some surprisingly acrobatic rim finishes).

And he had a good mid-range jump shot too—which in this era probably would end up being a three-point shot (note: his FT% was good enough that I don’t think it is all that speculative that he could’ve shot the three). He’d be like Joel Embiid with much more dominance on the boards and a bit less rim protection. In any event, I think most people are voting based on how a player played within their era, not based on some speculative notion of how well they’d do in the current era.

And worse passing, shot-making in general, "dominance on the boards gap" probably smaller than the defensive one today. Most voters use those speculative notions to an extent. Hence why Russell ended at 4th and Mikan finished 19th the last go around. I imagine that actually played a part in your own justification for earlier votes.

I’d be hesitant to assume that Moses’s dominance on the boards was less important than other things. When he joined or left teams, their relative offensive rebounding % tended to go up or down about 4% or 5% on average (not just in the minutes he was on court, but in the team’s overall numbers), and that was higher in his peak years. The math is a bit more complicated than this, but roughly speaking, causing your team to get an offensive rebound about 4% or 5% more often basically increases offensive rating by about 4-5% (actually slightly more for various reasons). That’s an enormous difference, and I don’t think there’s much of any evidence that Embiid has that kind of effect defensively. For instance, last year the Sixers had a defensive rating of 116.3 with Embiid off the floor, and a 113.3 defensive rating overall—which suggests he had a +2.6% effect overall on their defensive rating (and that’s probably overselling it since he is on the court with stronger players than average). The same analysis for the year before would be +2.9%. Granted, that’s all a bit back-of-the-napkin, but in general I just wouldn’t underestimate the effect of Moses Malone’s offensive rebounding.

If your point is that, if they played today, Moses might not be able to extract as big a gap on the offensive boards, then I’d say perhaps that’s right, given the lack of emphasis on offensive boards nowadays. I’ve noted in prior posts that there’s a bigger tradeoff in going for offensive rebounds now, so maybe Moses wouldn’t be able to go for as many (or if he did, it might have a bigger opportunity cost). But, of course, if he played today, he’d be playing against fewer bruising big men, so he might find it even easier to get those boards when he went for them, which could make him even better at it. It’s hard to know. Overall, I do think there’s a point that extracting value from being incredible on the offensive boards is a bit tougher nowadays, so it’s reasonable to think he might not be quite as good in this era as he was in reality. But he was great in his era (which matters most in this analysis) and the reason to think he’d maybe be a bit less good in today’s era is specific to the recent era (i.e. it doesn’t apply to the vast majority of NBA history).

The only other guy to win an MVP in that timeframe was Dr. J, and it was pretty obvious Moses was better than Dr. J, given that they were on the same team for a year and Moses was the team’s clear best player. Bird was really good in that timeframe too (he was there for four years of it), but was pretty clearly statistically inferior to Moses.

Circular. And second claim probably is dependent on what stats you end up using. Kareem actually looks as good or better than moses in the playoffs by that box-stuff you like:

It’s not circular. The two players were on a team together and it was super obvious which one was better. It was like LeBron and Wade on a team together.

As for those playoff stats with Kareem, they look very similar to me, and Moses got the better of Kareem when they actually faced each other in the playoffs in that era, so I’d say tiebreaker goes to Moses there.

Bird "outplaying" Moses is also certainly a conclusion you can defend with the box-score. Bird actually looks better via bbr BPM during that stretch for both the rs and the playoffs. Ben's BPM is also pretty low on him. Seems like you're being selective with your assessment of Moses's "statistical dominance".

I don’t know why you’re putting “statistical dominance” in quotes. I never said peak Moses displayed “statistical dominance.” He was great statistically and also was plainly recognized at the time as the best player, given that he got 3 MVP awards in those 5 years, with two of them being when his team won as few or fewer games than all the other major candidates for the award. When a player dominates the MVP award over a given time period despite having a relative lack of team wins, I think our baseline assumption should be that he was the best player in the league, unless there’s some significant reason to think otherwise. As it is, box stats don’t provide any such reason—with him looking very similar to (or perhaps even slightly better than) Kareem and better than everyone else. The fact that the MVP is merely a regular-season award doesn’t provide any such reason, as Moses won a dominant title in this timeframe, dragged a weak team to the finals another year, and got the better of his biggest rival both times they met in the playoffs. Nor can we reasonably say that impact data provides such a reason either. We basically have zero WOWY data for Moses in the timeframe, but we know that the Rockets completely collapsed when he left, that the 76ers were raised from really good to historically great when he joined, and that the on-off numbers we have for one year in this time period show him having a +15.6 on-off for a season. We also don’t have any real indication that the MVP votes themselves were seen as particularly controversial/wrong/close at the time, given that Sporting News’s MVP was the same in all those years too, and none of the actual MVP votes were all that close (with 1982 being the closest, but Moses still got twice as many first-place votes as the 2nd place person that year). I just don’t really see any compelling reason to second-guess his dominance of the MVP award in that timeframe.

Math in the bolded part is off as less than half of possesions of the average team end in offensive rebounds, even in the era

What you could go for instead is evaluating how many extra rebounds per 100 that offensive rebounding advanrage translated to and assuming each extra shot accounts for roughly 1/1.1 points (even accounting for the factor of reducing fastbreak opportunities)

[penbeast0]

Wilt is also the only one that maybe offensive rebounded anything like Moses. It’s really not a common thing, and Karl Malone definitely isn’t a valid comparator IMO. Prime Moses had about twice the offensive rebounding rate of prime Karl, and the *lowest* offensive rebounding rate of Moses’s career was still 40% higher than the *highest* offensive rebounding rate of Karl’s career (14% vs. 10%). In any event, on the question of value, Moses was literally deemed the most valuable player in the league 3 out of 5 years—despite his team not being all that great in two of those three MVP-winning years. He was widely understood to be a hugely valuable player, and what happened to his teams when he left Houston and joined Philadelphia backs this up, as does his on-off in the one year in the time period we have that data for.

I'd say the closest comp is Pettit. He's the one mainly known for offensive rebounding even more than rebounding in general, good post defense but not a great rim protector, low assist generator, not the physical beast Moses was but with more shooting range, got a significant number of his points on the FT line where (like Moses) he shot a good percentage, and was the best in the league for a few years between guys rated much higher (Mikan/Russell v. Kareem/Bird/Magic).